The Wallpaper Principle
Our gifts are both obvious and hidden. Sometimes, our most difficult gifts to spot are the most obvious. Find your 'wallpaper' gift, find your passion, and overcome impostor syndrome.
Our gifts are both obvious and hidden. Sometimes, our most difficult gifts to spot are the most obvious.
Better said: Sometimes, our most difficult gifts to spot are the most obvious to others.
One day, a friend shared the following anecdote:
“Sometimes, when I walk in the woods with someone, I’ll point out an interesting variation that makes one kind of plant different from another.
The person will look at me and say, ‘I just see green.’
And I feel like – I just stare at them open-mouthed as if to say: ‘What do you mean you ‘just see green’? How can you not see these differences?’”
To my friend — who is a forestry enthusiast, professional, and overall flora wizard — the differences between these two plants were as numerous, varied, and obvious as the differences between oranges and avocados.
However, to my friend’s associate — who, in the case of this story, is a businessperson with little interest in local plant life — the differences between these two plants appeared to be both granular and irrelevant in comparison to the sweeping and overwhelming (to their eyes) quality: They are both plants, they are both green; therefore, they are pretty much the same.
The purpose of sharing this story is not to point out the bluntness of my friend’s associate. (That may more or less speak for itself anyway.) The purpose of sharing this story is to point out how difficult it was for my friend, the flora wizard, to see his greatness. To see his gift.
To him, seeing distinctions and differences between plants is like breathing. It’s harder for him to miss these variations than to see them. When he looks at a plant, all manner of defining characteristics and distinguishing qualities reveal themselves to his outer and inner vision.
What he has a harder time seeing, however, is that others do not have the same experience when they look at plants.
This^ is what it looks like when our most obvious gifts are hidden from us.
To me, my friend’s ability with plants borders the supernatural.
To my friend, he’s just looking at the plant and sharing what’s obvious about it.
But here’s the thing my friend doesn’t realize he’s doing – and this is part of what hides our gifts from us: Simultaneously, while he is ‘just looking at the plant and sharing what’s obvious about it’, he is also intuitively comparing what he sees and knows about this plant against the other 18,000 plants in his experience that he knows just as much about. Furthermore, my friend has gained access to the Field of Intuition when it comes to plants, so he is simultaneously comparing this plant against that cosmic library as well.
This^ phenomenon unfolds in about 1/10,000th of a second – at the speed of thought – and it happens so quickly that it feels as though it’s happening on-top-of/at-the-same-time-as the observations of the plant in his field of view.
Therefore, to my friend, this process feels so obvious, natural, and effortless, he assumes anyone else can do what he’s doing.
Capitalism pop-quiz: How much value do we place on a thing everyone already has, and can get as much more of it as they want, for free, at any time?
Pretty much nil.
Exhibit A of this phenomenon: Breathing. Air.
Everyone already has plenty of it, and they can get as much more of it as they want at any time, for free.
Because of this phenomenon, no one values air very highly. We take it for granted a few thousand times a day when we breathe unconsciously.1
This is: The Wallpaper Principle.
When a thing has become so ‘normal’ in our experience that our mind no longer consciously registers it, the thing gets ‘moved to the back’ to make room for the rest of the sensory and neurological information we need to process in any given moment.
Likewise: When we become saturated in a field of interest to the point of true Understanding, our field of interest has become that ‘normal’ thing in our experience. It has become ‘wallpaper’ to our mind. At this point, we can process a tremendous deal of information about our field of interest seemingly ‘automatically’, without a great amount of conscious effort.
A common example of this which many of us have experienced is tying our shoes. When we first learned how to do this, it was clunky, and our hands were uncoordinated due to lack of familiarity with the movement. As days went by and our practice continued, the movement got smoother and more graceful. Then, one day, the movement became automatic. We tie our shoes now without thinking. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ we can tie our shoes, it’s not a matter of ‘how’ we tie our shoes. We just tie them. It’s simply a process we go through, a ‘doing’ we do. No muss, no fuss. No cookie, no gold star, no acknowledgement needed. We just tie our shoes and get on with our day.
And what’s more: almost everyone can tie their shoes.
When we reach this level of intimacy with a field of interest, it feels the same in our minds as tying our shoes. It feels like the ‘doing’ of this field of interest comes from that same effortless, ‘way in the back’ mental place. Because it feels the same as tying our shoes, we assume that — like tying our shoes — almost everyone can do it.
My friend assumed this^ about plants when he was walking in the woods with his associate. My friend assumed his ability with plants was the same as tying his shoes: almost everyone can look at a plant and see it the exact same way he does.
This^ is why my friend doesn’t see his greatness. He thinks his ability with plants is the same thing as tying his shoes or breathing: Oh, that? That’s nothing..
The strange thing is: for himself, he’s correct. His ability with plants has reached the same level of familiarity and expertise as his ability to tie his shoes. That’s how natural it is… to him.
To others, his ability is noteworthy in every possible regard. He is gifted — clearly, visibly, overtly gifted in his inherent, woven-in enthusiasm for plants and nature. This enthusiasm has led him down a whole network of rabbit holes and generated countless lines of inquiry, all in an inspired effort to learn more, to answer questions, to understand even one single plant a little bit better.
My friend is not ‘gifted’ because he was born with some savant-like database of knowledge already built into his consciousness. My friend is gifted because he gifts himself with knowledge through his own initiative. When questions arise — either from without (someone else asking) or from within (“Hmm, I wonder why this works this way…”) — he gifts himself with knowledge by dis-covering the answers to those questions. This is why he is gifted.
His path did not feel like anything epic, to him. To him, he was simply answering one question about one plant. The process of answering that question led to another question which also needed an answer. The process of answering that question inspired two more things that piqued his curiosity, with each of those things branching off into their own lines of inquiry. And on, it goes.
This^ is how experts are forged. True experts.2
It’s also how careers are made. One choice at a time. One answer at a time.
My friend happens to be in a field that is both his profession and his passion. Currently, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. But if you ask him, he will tell you with calm certainty that it was passion that got him involved in his profession to begin with.
In other words: Passion comes first.
Said from the other side of the coin: Profession serves passion.
One of the popular misnomers of ‘finding your passion’ is the idea that your passion is something you are good at presently. This may be true, but it also may not — depending on how much you have allowed yourself to live a life you enjoy.
The Truth of ‘finding your passion’ is: Your passion is something you do anyway.
Your passion is something you do automatically.
Regardless of whatever else it is you are supposed to be doing, you end up somehow managing to rope something else into it. The ‘something else’ is your passion.
Your passion can take on layered forms. Over time, it may appear to morph and evolve as you do. This is normal and healthy, and a good indicator of growth. On a long enough timeline, the structure of your passion – the ‘meta’ definition of it – will come into focus for you. The essence of your passion will be visible from this point, and you will be able to see that all the ‘content’ of what you thought was your passion was you living the ‘structure’ of it out, wearing different clothes and playing different roles. The details changed, but the structure remained consistent.
The structure is the passion. The content is the clothing, the appearance. If depth inspires you, look closely at the structure and reflect on what this may tell you about yourself. If appearance inspires you, think of different ways to express the structure… different outfits to put on your passion and present it to Creation. Neither way is wrong nor right. But each way does head in a different direction. Appearance takes you ‘outward’, into the world of forms. Structure takes you inward, into the world of essences. Up to you, which direction you wish to travel. Choose Your Own Adventure.
The Wallpaper Principle caused my friend to mis-take his self-actualized gifts as commonplace and valueless. When he did this, two things happened at once:
1. He mis-took the nature of the other person’s experience by over-blowing their level of involvement with and understanding of plants.
2. Simultaneously, he short-changed his own experience by projecting commonality — and therefore valuelessness — onto his own level of involvement with and understanding of plants.
This^ is a core ingredient in the phenomenon that has popularly become known as ‘Impostor Syndrome’.
Can you see how that is so?
When our greatest gifts are so common to ourselves that we (mistakenly) believe they are valueless… what more do we have left to contribute to the world that could be of any value?
Neutralizing a thought-pattern like impostor syndrome happens instantaneously when the impostor is brought into the light of our conscious awareness of our gifts. Bathing in the light of conscious acknowledgement of our gifts, the shadowy figure dissolves instantly.
By shifting our awareness from all we aren’t doing to all we are doing, the frantic energy of our nervous system begins to calm itself. Once we calm our nervous system, we drop down from fight/flight/freeze/fawn into a space where we can see life more clearly again.
From this^ space is where we want to acknowledge our Selves; acknowledge the gifts we bring to our world just by being Us. It is enough.
You are enough.
‘Impostor Syndrome’ is just a term for ‘the long-term effects of the advertising industry’. The unhealthy parts of our society are dying, and this is one of them. The age of living in a constant fog of fear is coming to an end. Fear of not being enough.. of not having enough.. of not doing enough. The fog is dissipating.
Our individual and collective inner light is the ‘sun’ that is burning that fog away. Evaporating it in the glorious daylight of conscious awareness of the majesticalness3 that is each and every one of us.
The more we acknowledge our gifts, the less impact agencies of fear can have on us. Immunity from chronic fear is Freedom.
We breathe an average of 20,000 times per day!
Ask Michael Jordan or LeBron James what they worked on most as basketball players? Their answers — over years of interviews — have included: dribbling, layups, and free throws. Nothing flashy. The fundamentals — practiced until each one felt the same as tying their shoes.
For my Wilderpeople out there.✌️